The Astros Score and the Collapse of Civilization: A Dispatch from the End of Days By the time you read this, the Houston Astros will have either won or lost another baseball game, and the numerical residue of that contest—what the sports desk clinically labels “the Astros score”—will ripple outward across the planet like a…
For forty-nine seasons, Saturday Night Live—that rickety American sketch-comedy jalopy—has been careening down the global information superhighway with its tailpipe on fire, belching punchlines into the lungs of anyone with a Wi-Fi signal and a morbid curiosity about the United States. From Lagos to Ljubljana, insomniac teenagers and exhausted shift nurses have discovered that SNL…
The Curious Case of Ahmad Hardy: How One Man’s Misfortunes Became the World’s Favorite Schadenfreude Cocktail DATELINE – Everywhere and Nowhere – The name Ahmad Hardy has begun to flicker across encrypted group chats from Lagos to Luxembourg, usually accompanied by the sort of emojis civilized people once reserved for tax audits. On paper he…
The Curious Case of Seth Rollins: How a Man in Tights Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By the time the Tokyo Dome lights dimmed last month, Seth Rollins had already been declared everything from “the last true American hero” by a breathless Fox Sports Asia pundit to “an avatar of late-capitalist nihilism” by a semi-sober…
Chicago White Sox: The World’s Most Reluctant International Ambassador By Dave’s Locker Global Correspondent It is a truth universally acknowledged—at least from Seoul to São Paulo—that if you want to teach a child about the random cruelty of existence, you could do worse than point them to the Chicago White Sox. While the rest of…
Rhea Ripley, the Australian-born harbinger of controlled chaos currently squatting in the WWE’s “Raw” division like a goth tarantula on a wedding cake, has become the rare piece of sports entertainment that actually exports something other than merch and disappointment. From the neon back-alleys of Tokyo’s Korakuen Hall to the fluorescent aisles of a São…
Amazon Video: The Streaming Colonizer Quietly Redrawing the Planet’s Cultural Borders By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between a Co-Working Couch and Existential Despair PARIS—Somewhere on the 17th arrospécial of a Haussmannian walk-up, a Senegalese-French data-scientist is binge-watching “The Boys” instead of finishing the code that might keep Mali’s largest hospital online. In São Paulo’s 3 a.m….
Fernando Mendoza, the name that’s currently ricocheting around encrypted group chats from Singapore to São Paulo, is neither a head of state nor a freshly sanctioned oligarch. He is, rather inconveniently, a 38-year-old Paraguayan agronomist who accidentally broke the global rice futures market last Tuesday—an achievement previously thought to require at least one Swiss bank…
Blue Jays: Feathered Diplomats in an Age of Collapsing Alliances By Our Correspondent, somewhere between Toronto and Tehran The blue jay—cyanocitta cristata to the taxonomically inclined, “that loud bastard on my balcony” to everyone else—has quietly become the most cosmopolitan bird never to clear customs. Native only to North America, it now serves as an…
**The Global Aftershocks of a Local Shooting Star** *How one teenager’s hoop dreams became a Rorschach test for the world’s favorite addictions: talent, hype, and premature nostalgia* Omar Cooper Jr. is 17, has a 43-inch vertical, and—if you believe the breathless trans-Atlantic highlight reels—already owes the world economy roughly the GDP of Malta in future…
It began, like so many modern parables, with a local TV station’s website buffering at 3 a.m. somewhere near Manchester, New Hampshire. WMUR News—call letters that sound like a Soviet washing-machine brand—was, to the untrained eye, just another regional American broadcaster churning out school-closing scrolls and footage of moose on interstate on-ramps. Yet from Singapore…
Zoe Saldaña: Hollywood’s Favorite Alien, Globalism’s Accidental Poster Girl PARIS—Somewhere between the popcorn-scented multiplexes of suburban Ohio and the neon-drenched midnight shows of Seoul, Zoe Saldaña has quietly become the most profitable non-terrestrial in cinematic history. Her cumulative box-office take—north of $14 billion—doesn’t just dwarf the GDP of several island nations; it also proves, in…
